Conferences

We are very pleased to announce our new Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Travel Fellowship program. The program is designed to enable people, whether long-standing members of our community or newcomers, to participate in eligible events for which costs would otherwise be prohibitive. This includes our annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC).

Although not limited to specific groups of people, the program constitutes another major step for us in our ongoing efforts to increase the diversity in our communities in particular, and in the open source / open science bioinformatics community in general. As explained in the just published BOSC 2015 report, inclusivity was one of the founding principles of the Bio* open-source project communities that came together under the OBF umbrella, and thus also of BOSC, our flagship event. OBF’s bylaws have included a nondiscrimination clause from the outset. OBF’s major member projects have not only always welcomed new participants to their communities, but embraced passing on leadership to people who hadn’t been part of the “inner circle” from the beginning.

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) has always been about community. Launched in 2000, BOSC aims to provide a forum for both bioinformatics developers and users to share ideas and code and learn about the latest developments in open source bioinformatics and open science.

Our goal this year is to welcome even greater participation, opening the door even wider to participants who have historically been underrepresented in the world of open source bioinformatics and, therefore, at BOSC. This includes (but is by no means limited to) women, people who aren’t white, older people, people from outside North America and Europe, and non-programmers.

Call for Abstracts for the 16th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2015), a Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISMB/ECCB 2015.

• Dates: 10-11 July, 2015
• Location: Dublin, Ireland
• Web site: /wiki/BOSC_2015
• Email: bosc@open-bio.org
• BOSC announcements mailing list
• Twitter: @OBF_BOSC and @OBF_News

Important Dates:

• March 24, 2015: Registration opens for ISMB and BOSC ( https://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2015-registration)
• April 3, 2015: Deadline for submitting BOSC abstracts
• May 3, 2015: Notification of accepted talk abstracts emailed to authors
• July 8-9, 2015: BOSC Codefest 2015, Dublin
• July 10-11, 2015: BOSC 2015, Dublin
• July 10-14, 2015: ISMB/ECCB 2015, Dublin

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) covers the wide range of open source bioinformatics software being developed, and encompasses the growing movement of Open Science, with its focus on transparency, reproducibility, and data provenance. We welcome submissions relating to all aspects of bioinformatics and open science software, including new computational methods, reusable software components, visualization, interoperability, and other approaches that help to advance research in the biomolecular sciences. We particularly wish to invite those who have not participated in previous BOSCs to join us this year!

We have asked you, and you have spoken! 59 past and/or future BOSC attendees participated in our survey, answering questions about what they liked at BOSC 2014, what changes they’d like to see, and — most importantly — what they thought about the proposal to possibly hold BOSC 2015 in Norwich (UK) rather than as an ISMB/ECCB SIG in Dublin (Ireland)..

Under this plan, BOSC 2015 would have been shortly before ISMB/ECCB, but in Norwich. We would have been hosted by The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) just after and co-located with the Galaxy Community Conference 2015 (GCC 2015, hosted by The Sainsbury Laboratory). Although some survey participants indicated that they would be more likely to attend BOSC 2015 if it were co-located with GCC, the majority preferred BOSC to remain an ISMB SIG, so we will hold BOSC 2015 in Dublin right before ISMB/ECCB 2015.

We’re pleased to publicly announce that we aim to video record all the talks at BOSC 2014, and the panel discussion, to be made freely available online after the conference. This is on an opt-out basis, and thus far none of our speakers have declined to be filmed. Last year we managed to record many of the talks - including both keynotes, which you can watch via the YouTube links on the BOSC 2013 Schedule. This year we are hiring a professional from Next Day Video ( @NextDayVideo on Twitter).

Thanks to those who participated in the BOSC 2014 Keynote Competition! Our winner is Manuel Corpas, who correctly surmised Philip Bourne:

https://twitter.com/manuelcorpas/status/412520369044463616

(In fact, we had already confirmed Philip Bourne as our second keynote speaker before his new job at NIH was announced.) Congratulations, Manuel, on winning free admission to BOSC 2014!

Dr. Bourne’s keynote talk will be entitled “Biomedical Research as an Open Digital Enterprise”:

The biomedical research lifecycle is fast becoming completely digital and increasingly open to the point that publishing could simply become changing the access control on given research objects comprising ideas, hypotheses, data, software, results, conclusions, reviews, grants and so on. This offers immense opportunities for software developers to enable the enterprise. I will describe a vision for the digital enterprise and what the NIH and others are doing to support the notion with the intent to accelerate scientific discovery.

[Read More]

We’re pleased to officially confirm that one of the two keynote speakers for the 15th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference ( BOSC 2014) will be C. Titus Brown, as he announced on Twitter recently:

Titus Brown (@ctitusbrown): Excited to be a keynote speaker at BOSC 2014! My title: “A History of Bioinformatics (in the year 2039)” - plenty of room for mischief ;) https://twitter.com/ctitusbrown/status/410934403565490176

In recognition of the growing use of Twitter and social media within science as a way of connecting across geographical divides, we’re announcing a Twitter competition to guess who is scheduled to give the second keynote at BOSC 2014 in Boston.